WTF? Of course they have another way to defend their market share. They just have to build the best devices and let the market decide.
And they did sweet fuck all for innovation anyways. They integrated a whole bunch of other people’s innovations in an exceptionally clever and useful fashion, but virtually none of the innovations were theirs. That’s not even a slam on Apple, because there’s a whole ton of skill involved in refining the UI and overall product, and they’re off the charts in that regard compared to most of their competition. But they didn’t invent the smartphone.
Yea, if anything, the Iphone is a good demonstration of why these types of patents are a bad idea. Apple took a bunch of stuff that already existed in other places, and put them together. People liked that product better then its competitors, and so Apple sold many more phones then their competitors. They dominated the market by producing a better product, not by getting the gov’t to give them a monopoly.
If previous companies had patented all those previous innovations, then presumably there’d be no Iphone.
If all the stuff in the Iphone is protected by patents, then the people that might have otherwise taken it and improved on it, won’t be able to do so. The next “Iphone” won’t happen.
The Prius is probably a good analogy for the iPhone. Even though (as you said) most of the technology had been around, what really caught people’s attention was the form factor. It just looked different then anything they had seen before. Then the Honda Insight came along and people said it was just a blatant ripoff of the Prius. Well, yeah, they do share the same body, but, if you think about what makes the Prius distinctive…Honda had done it years earlier. The fastback combined with that little window makes for a pretty distinctive look.
Yes, I know, it’s not an exact analogy and the cars aren’t identical and I don’t think there’s been lawsuits over it, and all the arguments have been on the internet. But it’s still a case of “You copied our thing” “No, actually, YOU copied OUR thing from a long time ago, we just didn’t say anything about it”
You can pretty much lay that charge on anyone that creates any intellectual property. It’s VASTLY easier to copy than to do the R&D necessary to refine an appealing product.
The end result of what you advocate is that nobody bothers.
Mechanical devices are just a bunch of gears and levers. Why should they be protected? IMO it’s a failure for some people to be able to transfer the concept of a patent from a physical implementation to something more abstract.
Whether or not Android is a better OS than iOS, or that the Samsung Galaxy is superior to the iPhone isn’t the issue. The point is, the iPhone shaped the smartphone industry as soon as it hit the shelves, by way of how it implemented all these various technologies into a product that all its competitors are now attempting to out-do. Apple sees that as infringing on their intellectual property; Samsung (et al) doesn’t.
So, their only legal recourse of action are these silly patents. Again, I say, these patents, ridiculous or not, is the leverage on which Apple’s decided to wage a smartphone turf-war.
I’m not really choosing a side here, this is simply my opinion on what seems to be going down.
I never said they invented the smartphone, but they most certainly did innovate it.
In fact, everything you describe in how Apple implemented a ton of skill and refined their GUI, etc. into a vastly superior product/device than was previously on the market is the very definition of innovation: in·no·vate/ˈinəˌvāt/
Verb
Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.
Apple’s great innovation was just in quality of delivery. The first iPhone was simply better than all other smartphones.
In the pre-iPhone smart phone market you basically had two major players. One was Nokia, which had released genuine smartphones prior to the iPhone. The other was BlackBerry, whose phone product was almost a totally different thing than iOS and was really more of a heavy business email-type client, but it was still a genuine smartphone by any definition.
There were some other smartphones that had come out from LG and HTC, and while they weren’t pretty or cool in any way there were several WindowsCE driven phones prior to the iPhone that were genuine smartphones.
All of those products save the BlackBerry had a serious problem: they delivered internet content in terrible format and were very unresponsive. They also had clunky physical interfaces.
Apple basically improved on all of those, iOS was designed to be very snappy and responsive. In some ways this meant the initial version of iOS was technically crippled even in comparison to some releases of Symbian or the BlackBerry OS in terms of things it could or couldn’t do. However Apple correctly realized that focusing on single application responsiveness over all the other clutter in the BlackBerry and Symbian OS would make for a much more responsive and enjoyable phone experience. They were 100% correct.
The first version of Safari on the original iOS was also superior to the web browsers available on BlackBerry and Symbian in rendering of pages and etc. It was actually a joy to web browse even on the first iPhone and it was mostly painful to web browse on pre-iPhone smartphones.
Finally, other smartphones were using interface input like trackballs and reactive touchscreens, Apple went for a capacitive touchscreen which was overall more responsive and enjoyable for the user. Apple also launched with a screen that emphasized resolution and clarity.
But those are all basically ways in which Apple released a much better product than their competitors. They did that by delivering a better product, not by actually inventing much of anything. Patents deal with invention and novel product creation and really there is little of that going on in the smartphone industry as a whole. In the software industry there is even less, and truth be told I’m skeptical as to whether or not software patents at all should even be allowed to exist.
Also, the iPhone and Android phones wouldn’t be what they are today, had it not been for Jobs’s tenacity on completely up-ending the way the carriers did their business with manufacturers and consumers as well.
The devices themselves were only half the battle (and quite a tremendous battle at that). I remain unconvinced that we’d have the same quality of smartphones (the OSs, hardware and the carrier backbone) today if it weren’t for what Jobs/Apple pulled off in '06/07.
The modern offerings at the time, let alone their approach to future designs, by LG, HTC, Motorola, RIM, Samsung, Nokia, etc. were laughable jokes by comparison.
Yes, Apple’s performance in the market demonstrates that competition results in better products for consumers. But Apple is using a very screwed up technology patent system to stifle innovation and competition. If many of the large patent holders who held various patents that are directly applicable to smartphones (Samsung owned several critical 3G patents) against Apple when it first launched the iPhone consumers today would be much worse off.
The patent system is for the benefit of society, not individual market participants. The underlying idea is certain innovations are expensive and costly and can be easily copied. In the totally free market, it is felt inventors would not pursue such inventions because competitors would just immediately copy their invention without having to lay out all that R&D capital. So governments have instituted a patent system, not for the benefit of inventors, but for the benefit of society as a whole which might be deprived of important novel inventions otherwise.
I don’t believe any of these problems are present in the current smartphone world. As proof, note that Apple has been extremely successful in the smartphone market, commanding 17% of the market (small compared to Android, but Android is not a manufacturer it is an OS that many manufacturers use to run their phones) and representing many billions of dollars in revenue for Apple.
Finally, just because something you do gets copied doesn’t mean a patent was violated. In the UK this was properly recognized, because the underlying innovation actually needs to be novel and non-obvious such to warrant a patent in the first place. The argument for letting Apple have these patents stand up would be akin to saying just because GM (or whoever) shipped the first car with bluetooth connectivity they should get to patent the concept of bluetooth in a car and no other car manufacturer should be allowed to use bluetooth in a car for 20 years. That’s a ludicrous concept, whoever was the first to put bluetooth connectivity in a car invented essentially nothing, it was just a feature add utilizing extant technology.
I’m in agreement. I think the verdict was downright asinine.
That said, to me it seems obvious Apple is really trying to deliver a blow to Android by way of Samsung. They can’t sue Google over Android directly, so they’re attacking manufacturers in whatever litigious way they can. To everyone’s surprise/dismay, the jury ruled in favor of Apple.
To me, it demonstrates an insidious flaw in patent law. The whole ordeal is an unmitigated mess, and I can see it from all angles: Apple, who forged the new market with great cost and effort, and is more interested in growing the iOS user base than any revenue at this point (sitting on 100+ billion, as they are); Samsung (et al) who are trying to compete in a relatively new market with great Android devices as an alternative to the iPhone, and to remain relavent in the smartphone industry; Google, who has the same interest as Apple in keeping a stronghold in their userbase; and us, the consumers who the cost of these products/services really get passed on to.
I think this completely ignores Apple’s historical maintenance of margins over growing market share.
And as far as the verdict is concerned, IMO it’s simple matter of looking at the market before and after Apple’s product success and noting Samsung’s internal memos after deconstructing Apple’s product and recommending that Samsung product would be better if it were more like Apple’s.
There is nothing wrong with looking at the market and modifying your product to follow the designs and trends in the market that are successful. Every company does it, even Apple.
Look at Google creating their own Java. They looked at the market and decided that Java is the way to go. But they didn’t want to license it. So they created their own JVM and compilers etc. from scratch. Nothing wrong with that.
If a whole computer language is not patentable (as we found out with Java), then the piddly Apple UI patents should be thrown out.
I personally invented several UI elements that are now widely used in various stock trading programs. These UI elements are just as distinctive, if not more so, than what Apple used in this lawsuit. And just as obvious, in hindsight. I am quite satisfied that people use them, and patenting them never crossed my mind. Apple, especially with its history of appropriating others’ UI innovations, should have done the same. I hope Samsung appeals this all the way up and prevails.
And…? Any business would look at what a successful competitor is doing and try to emulate them where possible. I don’t see how that infringes on patents in this case.
I think Apple’s success has always been more about its marketing than true innovation. Job’s (and Apple’s) great accomplishment was to realize–long before anyone else–that the vast majority of potential sales (for everything from home computers to phones) are not going to be tapped by presenting the devices as tools for productivity. Rather, they essentially have always marketed their devices as toys, and that’s really what most people buy them for.
They looked at the latest technological possibilities and thought: “How can we package these to provide people with new, stylish ways to goof off, that no one has seen before?” That isn’t exactly something that you can really patent, but maybe the jury was thinking that way.
This seems to be a strange view of the word “invention”. Are you saying that something is only an “invention” if it involves some kind of new, physical object?
Apple “invented” a novel user interface for interacting with a mobile phone. The user interface was many times easier to use, more flexible, more intuitive, more pleasant, etc. than anything that came before. That was the only reason for the iPhone’s runaway success. It certainly wasn’t because of the phone’s technical excellence, it was solidly middle-of-the-road in terms of pure technical specifications. Are you saying the iPhone UI is not an invention, or that it was not highly innovative by itself? I challenge you to find any screenshots of a pre-iPhone smartphone UI that demonstrate that it was not novel and non-obvious.
I think you may be forgetting just how novel the iPhone was at the time it was released. It was not merely a “better” version of competitors phones. It was completely unlike any phone anyone had made before. It is bizarre to imply that it was not “novel”.
Apple released a much better product than their competitors because of the innovative new UI. Every smartphone on the market today imitates that UI. Remember all the pundits claiming that the iPhone would fail because it didn’t have a physical keyboard? How many new smartphones being announced today have physical keyboards? Essentially zero. How many smartphones, before the iPhone, had physical keyboards? All of them. The idea of a phone that was simply a large touchscreen, with just one physical button, was completely novel.
The three patents at issue cover user interface innovations that were partly responsible for the iPhone’s success. They are small features, to be sure, but they contribute to the intuitive nature of the interface: the automatic zooming on structured documents, the “rubber band” effect when you scroll past the end of a list, and various other related scrolling / manipulation effects.
I don’t see how that proves your point. 17% is a fairly small fraction of the market. Android is essentially a clone of the iPhone interface (here are some interesting pictures of the Android phone Google was working on before the iPhone release). Who’s to say that Apple would not have a larger share of the market if not for Android cloning them?
The US has the same novelty and non-obviousness requirements for patents as the UK, and the rest of the world.
Again, I challenge you to explain how Apple’s “smart zoom” patent and “rubber band” scrolling patent were not novel and non-obvious at the time they were filed. Note that pretty much all inventions are obvious in retrospect, and that “simple” is not the same thing as “obvious”.
I am always tremendously insulted by statements like this, because I buy Apple products precisely because they are best at staying out of my way and letting me get work done. It strikes me that the people who buy Android phones because they offer freedom to tinker and customize are the ones who are looking for a toy. I don’t want to “tinker” with my fucking phone, I just want it to work.
Let me point out that the first iPhone did not have any games, nor any entertainment apps (other than Youtube and the music player). It allowed people to check their email, keep notes, keep track of their calendar, and browse the web, as well check the weather, stocks, set alarms, and a few other miscellaneous utility tasks. That was it. Hardly a “toy”. Actually, pretty boring if you want to “goof off”. You couldn’t even play any web-based games because it didn’t support Flash. Games and other “entertainment” apps were not even available at all for another 18 months or so. The first TV ad showed how you can play music, check your email, and read the New York Times website. Not exactly a thrill a minute.
I fear that Apple may be leading the smartphone industry into a Seldon patent-like situation, where innovation is stifled for 20 years so Apple can claim a financial piece of every smartphone made over the next two decades.
The early film industry had the same problem - Edison (iirc) held a number of patents that prevented the artistic growth of the industry until Meyer, et al fled across the country to set up the Hollywood system of motion picture production.
Except that they’re bogus patents. The only one that’s not bloody obvious is the bounce back effect, and there’s prior art on that one. Not on a phone, granted, but you don’t get to take an existing UI element, append “onna phone” to it, and have it be a valid patent. Well, okay, apparently you do, but it’s complete bullshit. That’d be like taking a new style of brakes developed for trucks, sticking them on a car, and claiming novelty. Because they’re on a car! No one’s ever done that before! OMG how brilliant and innovative.
Slide to unlock is so obvious it’s painful. You want to unlock a phone with a touchscreen. You can’t use a single tap because if you do everyone will be butt-dialing constantly. So you want the least complicated, easiest to execute gesture input that’s convenient to input when holding the device in a typical fashion. What gesture is that going to be?
However, obviousness, like lack of novelty, is apparently no barrier to phone patents.
Look, Apples vaunted UI (and it is very nice, I grant you) is just not very novel. It basically takes a generic GUI and tweaks it to accommodate the small screen (hence the importance of easy zooming and scrolling) and large blunt pointing devices (hence the large icons). Apple may have taken the lead in recognizing the importance of these tweaks, but large icons in neat rows are not a bloody innovation. There were large icons in neat rows in DOSshell for fuck’s sake. Actually we can probably thank Apple for stealing from Xerox back at the dawn of time for the icons. The bounce back is indeed a very clever way of disambiguating between “you can’t scroll further” and “the stupid touchscreen isn’t working right”, but Apple wasn’t the first to come up with it. Linking zoom to a simple form of input when zooming is important isn’t rocket science, and has been a staple element of computer UI in graphics editors for ages.
Furthermore, the UI of other smartphones wasn’t as bad as you’re making out. The big failing of most other smartphones was that they weren’t fast enough and so hung and lagged all the time. This leads users to continue inputting commands which get queued up and then executed whether or not they’re still desired. Stick an old version of Blackberry OS or whatever onto a blazing fast device that never hangs and while it’ll seem kinda clunky mostly because it’s built for the rollerball input it’s not going to be painful to use. Well, okay, it may be, but only because it’s built for the rollerball input instead of fingers. Apple’s genius was (1) waiting to enter the market until there was a mobile chip capable of performing, and (2) integrating the software and hardware more tightly than the competition (something they’ve a long tradition of doing in larger form factors) and optimizing everything for smooth graphic output over all else.
Maybe they should have filed for the business method patents of Method for Waiting till the Time is Right to Launch a Product and Method for Polishing you Design so it’s Shinier than the Competition’s. Those would be valid, right? Myself, I just regret not filing for Method of Filing New Patents by Appending “Onna Phone” to Old Patents.
I never said it only includes invention of a new physical object, but it’s supposed to be:
Non-obvious
A significant improvement over the state of the art.
I’m not just saying that is how patents should work, that’s actually the patent law. And there are many, many examples where patent law is not really being enforced appropriately in the software industry.
Slide to unlock was present in a 2005 Windows CE phone that predates the iPhone. Icons displayed in a tiled format date back to the 1980s, just because you do it on a phone that doesn’t mean it should be patented. That’s again, like saying the first company to think “oh shit, let’s put a bluetooth receiver inside a car!” should get a patent on “bluetooth in cars.” That’s ridiculous.
Yes, their interface was unique. Unique does not instantly make it something that you’re supposed to issue a patent for, lots of things are unique without being inventions worthy of patent protection.
But lots of elements in the iPhone UI were present in previous phone UIs. Have you seen the home screen of older BlackBerry, WindowsCE, even Symbian phones? They all had a home screen with a tile of icons.
Do you know what the specific novelty requirements are for a patent? Is it your contention that anything that is unique can be patented?
The LG Prada already mentioned, which was developed and announced before the iPhone, had a large touchscreen and a form factor very similar to an iPhone. That invalidates a lot of the claims that Apple was just totally inventing some new thing here. Actually take a look at the Prada, which beat the first iPhone to market. It has a large capacitive touchscreen, a small bar at the bottom with three physical buttons and no keyboard. Obviously your claim that the iPhone was the first phone to have no physical keyboard is simply false.
Not only is it false, it’s ludicrously false. Are you aware that IBM actually released a cell phone in 1994 as a proof of concept with a touchscreen and no physical keys?
Various products like Adobe Acrobat, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Microsoft Word and probably software going back more than 15 years has similar features to the automatic zooming.
The patents actually at issue for the Samsung case was the rubber band effect, automatic zoom, slide to unlock, and four “design” patents. If you look at the LG Prada it is almost impossible for me to understand how the iPhone could receive a patent for a form factor and appearance that was more or less already out there. Again, patents are supposed to represent a “significant improvement over the state of the art” precisely because minor tinkerings are not supposed to get patents. If you look at the LG Prada, sure it isn’t quite as attractive as the first iPhone but it is a leap to say the form factor of the first iPhone is “a significant difference or improvement” over the LG Prada form factor.
The slide to unlock and autozoom features are not new at all, and we can prove slide to unlock on a 2005 Windows CE phone almost 3 full years before the first iPhone was ever released. The rubber band effect may be the one unique thing, but to me that’s like patenting a specific type of transitional animation. It’s just ridiculous.
If the original idea isn’t something that can be patented then there is really nothing wrong with cloning. Cloning is pretty much standard in all industries. Patents are supposed to be very significant processes and inventions, not vague all encompassing claims (which is what you are making.) Apple’s patents aren’t for the “OS as a whole” either, they are for specific features in the OS that really don’t appear to be novel and were actually prior art (meaning others had already released products doing exactly the same thing, which invalidates the patent innately.)
Non-obvious is supposed to be analyzed under the “legal fiction” of an “technical expert in the field” if a technical expert in the field would not be able to obviously come up with something then you can say it’s passed one of the patent requirements.
The UK actually struck down all these patents that were involved in this specific case, so obviously you are mistaken about the actualities of UK and US patent law. The truth is the US patents are no more valid, we just have inferior courts apparently when it comes to analyzing patent law. You do realize the jury literally admitted they ignored the prior art argument (an extremely important point when it comes to patents) because it was “too confusing” and just decided “hey, Apple has a patent so obviously they’re in the right.”
The problem is we have patent examiners for technology products who are rubber stamping patent applications and courts aren’t really doing their due diligence to second guess that process.
I shudder to think if big players like IBM had been given patents for all the little piddly elements of computer interfaces and operating systems how stifled computer innovation would have been.
For that matter, when personal computers first became a big business in the 1980s most of the software that was created were adaptations of popular types of software being used on mainframes. What if the first person to port a spreadsheet program to a personal computer patented it? Because obviously “first spreadsheet on a PC” is so fundamentally, earth-shatteringly different from the same exact product on a mainframe it is deserving of a patent :dubious:. No, there is a reason that back in the 80s these frivolous software patents would not have held water.
I wish I could find his name now, but there is a former U.S. Appellate Judge who stated in the 80s that the rise of software patents is one of the greatest threats to the computer industry and I think we’re finally starting to realize it now because of the critical mass of patents that the big players have.
I never said they invented the smartphone, but they most certainly did innovate it.
